


hold back the dawn

by ghostrunner



Category: The Borgias, The Borgias (2011)
Genre: Multi, Sibling Incest, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-17
Updated: 2014-04-17
Packaged: 2018-01-19 18:41:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1480012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostrunner/pseuds/ghostrunner





	hold back the dawn

"May I kiss you?" Lucrezia says, politely, and La Bella smiles like they have a private joke. Her mouth is very red. "Only if we are to be friends."

Giulia Farnese teaches her to kiss and she crumples her half-finished wedding dress in her fists at Giulia's touch. Her mouth at her throat, her fingernails on her thighs.

"Do you kiss my father thus?" she asks, breathless, the blood rising in her cheeks and across her chest and in pinprick points at the bend of her elbow and the soft skin of her wrist.

La Bella smiles like the joke is only hers, but it is a gentle one. "I kiss you thus," she says.

\--

It is far from the first time she has ever spied her priestly brother with a woman, but it is different to see him thus, in the Vatican, robed in cardinal red, with the taste of Giulia still in her mouth, and La Bella's pearl-roped hair caught in his fingers.

The ornamental grate makes the shadows of crosses across her vision and turns Giulia and Cesare to indistinct archetypes of lovers embracing. His hands strong on her waist, his kiss demanding, her mouth at his throat and the buttons of his raiment undone and everything is red. The red of blood, the red of the church, the red of Giulia Farnese's mouth.

Lucrezia touches her fingers to her lips in curious, frustrated want. The crosses blur.

\--

"Do you accept it, then?" Cesare is saying, and she means to answer but she gets lost in the darkness of his eyes and the smell of the blood on the knife and instead she says, "May I kiss you?"

He looks surprised, which surprises her, and then greedy, which she likes, and then hesitant, which she will not tolerate. Lucrezia rises onto the tips of her toes and finally he whispers, "Your wish is my command," his lips brushing hers as he speaks and she kisses him with the taste of Giulia Farnese under her tongue and a bloodied blade between them.

Underneath the taste of his mouth is the surging tide of his blood and she tastes with her teeth just a little, and then a little more because the sound he makes says never stop just like his hands in hers say I promise and from the doorway La Bella says, "Enough, gently, gently," because she could devour him entire before it was too much.

Giulia's cold fingers tug at her hair, pull her back, brush Cesare's lips, now painted red as her own. The light through the carved shutters throws crosses on the floor.

"I shall show you," says La Bella Farnese, the great ageless Roman beauty, and the knife falls, accepted and forgotten, as she takes their hands to lead.

\--


End file.
